


Between the Shadow and the Soul

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2016 [35]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7358830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompts:</p><p>"Any, Any, I love you as certain dark things are to be loved / in secret, between the shadow and the soul (Pablo Neruda)"</p><p>"Author’s choice, author’s choice, <i>I just wanted to tell you. / Every time I think I’m finally used / To this hollow feeling in my chest, / To the fact I’ll never hear your laugh again, / To the fact that I’ll reach for you and you can’t reach back, / Something happens and I’m gutted again.</i>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Shadow and the Soul

When the first gift arrived, Daniel didn't think much of it, other than to be pleased and flattered. He assumed it was from Sam, because Sam had been the one to comment on the scented candles he'd been burning right before everyone showed up for their most recent team night (Star Wars yet again). His candles had been running low, so coming home to find a delivery of them on his doorstep was a pleasant surprise. Daniel took them inside and reminded himself to do something nice for Sam. She hadn't sent them with a card, so she didn't care to be acknowledged for it, but Daniel would show his gratitude anyway.  
  
He bought her a bag of her favorite coffee blend, because he knew it was a precious to her as it was to him, and she went to great lengths to keep a stash somewhere in the lab only she knew about.  
  
At first Daniel didn't realize the second gift was a gift at all. When he opened the box the UPS man brought him, it was full of – books. Pictures. An old blanket. Things he thought had been lost to the ravages of time. Things that had fallen through the cracks of the foster system behind him, things he'd never get to see again. The most precious thing in the box was the manuscript of the book his mother and father had been writing together about the pyramids, the book that had informed some of his earliest theories about who actually built them. Daniel lifted out the yellowed pages reverently and smoothed a hand over them.   
  
The third gift was very obviously a gift. Left on the door step, wrapped and tied with a ribbon. A brand new leather journal. With an inscription inside in startlingly familiar handwriting.  
  
 _May you ever journey safely on._  
  
It was in Jack's handwriting. Today wasn't Daniel's birthday. But it was the anniversary of the very first time Daniel stepped through the gate, not as part of SG-1, but as a nervous linguist who was sure he could help bring Jack's soldiers home. Jack hadn't mentioned it at all (they never mentioned it, not the way their eyes had locked between the transport rings, the way Daniel had told Jack to wait for him and Jack had answered unwaveringly in the affirmative even though Daniel had had Sha'uri in his arms).  
  
Daniel sat down on the doorstep, keys still in the lock, and examined the leather. It was fine work, hand-done by Daniel's eye. The subtle glyphs worked into the spine, the gate address that led back to Earth from Abydos, had to have been a custom job. Daniel wondered how Jack had justified the risk of violating the NDA to get this made. But the journal was beautiful. Daniel went to stand up, and then his neighbor called out to him.  
  
"Dr. Jackson!"  
  
Mrs. Culver was a widow, well-meaning, whose two daughters lived far away. One was in a terrible marriage, the other was single and in law school (and her availability was unsubtly mentioned frequently). Mrs. Culver spent most of her days working in her garden, which was beautiful. Daniel might have suspected alien technology at work, the way the woman's lawn stayed green months after everyone else's died, if she hadn't described in frightening detail the gasoline-beer-tobacco recipe she used to keep her lawn nuclear-bright in the chilly autumn months.  
  
"Your nephew keeps missing you." Mrs. Culver straightened up and headed toward him. Her knees and gloves were covered with dirt, and she was perspiring beneath her straw hat.  
  
"My nephew," Daniel said cautiously.  
  
"Very polite young man," Mrs. Culver said. "Name of Jonathan. He's stopped by a few times to try to see you, but you work such strange hours for the Air Force. He left your birthday present on the doorstep."  
  
Daniel had no siblings, and he didn't know anyone named Jonathan.  
  
Except he did. Jonathan J. O'Neill. Who had been cloned into a teenager, a teenager Daniel hadn't seen in three years. Old enough to be called a young man, then. With Jack's half a century of memories and upbringing, so he'd be polite to Mrs. Culver.  
  
"Thanks, Mrs. Culver," Daniel said, glad when his voice didn't come out choked. "I didn't realize he was in town. He must have been trying to surprise me. I'll give him a call."  
  
"How old is he?" Mrs. Culver asked. "I'm sure my Nicole wouldn't mind a younger man."

"Eighteen," Daniel said. "Just turned eighteen. I'd better go check in with him. Thanks for letting me know!" And he fled into the house. He had to backtrack for his keys. He set the journal and the keys on his kitchen counter and went hunting for his SGC manual. There was someone he was supposed to call for this kind of thing.   
  
Except the clone had been emancipated when he was fifteen. Now that he was eighteen, he was more or less free to do what he wanted.  
  
"Daniel."  
  
Daniel paused, halfway through the contents of his junk drawer, and turned.  
  
Jonathan stood in the hallway, wearing khakis and a leather jacket and looking even more like Jack than before. He was coming up on his full height, but his shoulders were still narrow. His face still had boyish lines, but he was recognizably Jack O'Neill.  
  
"Jonathan," Daniel said. If that was how he'd introduced himself, that was probably what he wanted to be called.  
  
"I'm leaving," Jonathan said. "Leaving town. The IOA and SGC will never find me. I have a lot of money and identities left over from my black ops days, and I have places I want to go, things I've always wanted to see. I just wanted to say farewell."  
  
"Thank you," Daniel said, gesturing to the journal. "It's beautiful. And thank you for telling me."  
  
"I thought of joining back up with the Air Force, coming in for round two, but I don't think I can do it anymore. Going through the gate. Watching you die over and over again. Not that you and I would be on the same team. That privilege belongs to someone else."  
  
Daniel wanted to tell him that privilege belonged to him too, but it didn't. Whatever had happened in the past three years, Jonathan O'Neill was his own person.  
  
"I just –" Jonathan cut himself off, bit his lip and looked away. When he spoke again, his voice shook. "I can't have you. Neither of us can. Him because of his uniform and his wings and me – me because I look like _this_." He swept a hand over his own lean, youthful form in disgust. "Because no one would understand and we could never explain and – and I don't even know if you ever felt that way about me. About either of us. And now it doesn't matter." He started backing away. "Goodbye, Daniel." He turned and headed for the front door.  
  
Daniel moved faster than he ever had in his life, caught him by the shoulder. "Jonathan, wait. You can't just – drop that kind of thing in my lap and run."  
  
"I couldn't live with myself if I never told you," Jonathan said quietly, not looking at him, "but I can't stay here. I can't live like this."  
  
"What will you do? Where will you go?" Daniel asked.  
  
"I can't tell you. They'll look for me, and I don't want them to put too much effort into asking you."  
  
"Jonathan –"  
  
"Don't make this any harder than it has to be. Please."  
  
Daniel bit his lip and nodded, stepped back, but his lungs felt like they were filled with glass shards, and he had to turn away before Jonathan saw more than he would want to see.  
  
He waited for the front door to open and close again. It didn't.  
  
A hand closed around his wrist. "Daniel?"  
  
Daniel snatched his hand away. "No, Jack. Go. I – you did what you needed to do. I understand. Now I need some time to deal, so if you could please –?"  
  
Jonathan tugged Daniel around to face him. "Daniel?"  
  
"You bastard!" Daniel cried. "All these years, I've loved you, and you lay this on me now, when it's not even _you_ , when you're about to run away."

Jonathan flinched. "Daniel –"

" _Fuck you_ , Jack. Just go."

"I'm not Jack."

"I know that! And I don't care." Daniel lunged and caught Jonathan by the back of the neck and yanked him in for a kiss.

It was painful, clashing teeth and mashed lips. It was perfect. Jonathan's body was warm and firm and his mouth was soft and he tasted like coffee. It was too much. Jonathan pulled back, and Daniel let him go, and then Jonathan was out the front door and across the yard and down the street.

Daniel managed to slam the front door before he sank to his knees and cried.

No one understood what was going on when Daniel avoided Jack's phone calls from Washington for a week after that. When Daniel finally called him back, Jack said,

"So my Xerox went missing."

"Landry hasn't mentioned it."

"He said goodbye to you, didn't he?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny."

"He told you, didn't he?"

Daniel didn't answer.

Jack hung up.

The next day, Daniel put in for a transfer to Atlantis.

 

*

 

Jonathan Neilson didn’t think about Daniel Jackson, not ever. If he walked around campus with a hollow feeling in his chest, well, he’d had fifty-two years of life, love, friendship, and service ripped away from him. If he turned too sharply when he heard a man laugh just like Daniel did, he was only human. And if he woke in the night screaming from visions of Daniel dying yet again, reached for him in the darkness like he had a hundred times in a tent off-world, it was perfectly reasonable that Daniel wasn’t there.

Daniel wasn’t his, had never been his. Daniel belonged to the real Jack O’Neill, and Jonathan Neilson was just a faded carbon copy.

Looking in the mirror every morning at his damnably young face gutted him all over again.

So he studied hard, damn hard, and he piled them on, language and after language after language. They said after the third it got easier, and it did. He got a second major in math, and a minor in physics, and he was going to apply to grad school, get a grad degree in cryptography, because logic puzzles were one of the Ancients’ favorite past times, but the SGC came calling for him. Read him in, offered to have him trained onsite in Atlantis himself.

And because he had once been Jack O’Neill, they didn’t crack his alias. His background came up clean. He was Jonathan Neilson. Between his glasses - an unnecessary affect - and the way he dressed, in conservative button-down shirts and khakis and bow-ties, no one recognized him.

Mitchell was in charge under the Mountain, Lorne his 2IC, and the original SG-1 had scattered to the wind. Vala was leading her own gate team, specializing in recon and recovery. None of them looked at him twice, thrown off by his carefully cultivated California accent and his mild manners, his utter lack of sarcasm.

He packed up his life, put it in boxes in storage, and then stepped through the Stargate with nothing but a duffel bag and a crate of books and the clothes on his back, and he let himself get flung to another galaxy.

Richard Woolsey, John Sheppard, and Rodney McKay greeted him in the gate room of Atlantis.

Jonathan went through introductions on autopilot, smiled politely when Teyla showed him to his quarters near the other scientists. She left him alone to get unpacked. He counted to forty after the door closed behind her, abandoned his duffel bag, and went in search of the archives. It was the storehouse of all things literature and artefacts, the home of the xeno-archaeologists and xeno-anthropologists and xeno-linguists, of which Jonathan was the newest and youngest.

There was a man standing at one of the tables, carefully brushing dirt off of a stone tablet. Jonathan knew the set of his shoulders, the furrow of his brow, the flick of his wrist immediately.

Daniel.

Jonathan cleared his throat. “Dr. Jackson.”

Daniel lifted his head, eyes wide, and Jonathan knew the look on his face, had seen it every morning in the mirror for years, knew Daniel was being gutted all over again by the memory of what he almost had.

“...Jack?”

“Jonathan Neilson, these days.”

Daniel set down his brush and crossed the lab in an instant. He caught Jonathan’s face in his hands and leaned in, kissed him, and after all those years of being gutted, Jonathan was finally put back together.


End file.
